Ravenna, a Study

by Edward Hutton

XIV

RAVENNA IN THE MIDDLE AGE

The last great original work to be undertaken in Ravenna as the capital of the empire in the West was the building and decoration of the churches of S. Vitale and S. Apollinare in Classe. All the Byzantine work that was done later in Ravenna is merely imitative, an expression of failing power under the crushing disaster of the Lombard invasion. When at last Aistulf in 751 made himself master of the impregnable city, it ceased, and suddenly, to be a capital, and though in 754 Pepin "restored" it to the papacy and established the pope throughout the Exarchate and the Pentapolis, he by that act founded the Papal States, whose capital of necessity was Rome. Thus Ravenna found herself when Charlemagne had been crowned emperor in 800 little more than a decaying provincial city, without authority or hope of resurrection, and it is as a city of the provinces full only of gigantic memories that she appears in the Middle Age and the Renaissance and remains to our own day.

The appearance of Charlemagne, the resurrection of the empire in the West, confirm and consolidate the misfortune of 751 in which indeed she lost everything. But when we see the great Frank strip the imperial palace of its marbles and mosaics it is as though the fate of Ravenna had been expressed in some great ceremony and not by unworthy hands. An emperor had set her up so high, an emperor had kept her there so long; it was an emperor who, as in a last great rite, stript her of her apparel and left her naked with her memories.

[Illustration: The Campanile of S. Apollinare]

Those memories, not only splendid and glorious, but gaunt and terrible too, smoulder in her ruined heart as the fire may do in the ashes when all that was living and glorious has been consumed. Almost nothing as she became when Charlemagne left her, a mere body still wrapt in gorgeous raiment stiff with gold, but without a soul, she still dreamt of dominion, of empire, and of power. Governed by her archbishops, she rebelled against Rome, struggled for a secular and sometimes a religious autonomy, and came at last, as surely might have been prophesied, to consider herself as a feudatory of the Empire, not of the Church.

But though this struggle might have been foreseen it is futile, it has no life in it, it is without any real importance, it leads nowhere and fails to interest us. All that really concerns us in the confused story of Ravenna from the time of the resurrection of the empire till our own day are two strange incidents that have nothing fundamentally to do with her, that befell her by chance; I mean the apparition of Dante, when we see the most eager mediaeval apologist of the imperial idea fortunately and rightly find in her a refuge and a tomb; and the battle of 1512 in which fell Gaston de Foix and which cost the lives of twelve thousand men and achieved nothing.

Nevertheless Ravenna, for so long the citadel of the empire in the West, of all the cities of Italy was least likely to forget her origin or to forsake her memories, and it is both curious and interesting to watch her entry, little splendid though that entry be, into the marvellously vital world of the Middle Age in Italy.

The slow re-establishment of Latin power which followed the crowning of Charlemagne, and which the Church secured by that act, first began to come to its own with the rise of the bishops to civil power in the cities of Italy. Now Ravenna had certainly been governed by her archbishop ever since Pepin in 754 had forced Aistulf to place the keys of the city upon the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles. If nowhere else in the Cisalpine plain, Latin civilisation and law, then, never failed in Ravenna, and whatever may have happened elsewhere it might seem certain that here in Ravenna and probably throughout the exarchate the curia existed and endured throughout the barbarian confusion.

This would explain the early and extraordinary development of communal institutions in Ravenna. And since, one may believe, the Roman legions were replaced throughout the empire by the religious orders, it is interesting to know that in the tenth century her Latin energy is borne witness to by the fact that in 956 she produced S. Romuald of the Onesti family of Ravenna, who was educated in the Benedictine monastery of Classe and who founded the Order of Camaldoli, and toward the end of the same century, in 988, she produced S. Peter Damian, the brother of the arch-priest of Ravenna, cardinal-bishop of Ostia and papal legate in Milan.

Nor with the rise of the "spirito italico" everywhere in Italy do we find Ravenna exhausted. Far from it, she is as ardent as any other city of the peninsula whatsoever. Only always she is anti-papal, as though, living in her memories, as she could not but do, and this was her greatest strength, she remembered her old allegiance to the emperor and could not forget that when the pope became his heir in Italy she had fallen from her old eminence. Thus as early as the first years of the eleventh century her archbishop obtains confirmation from the emperor of his temporal powers, in which confirmation no recognition of the sovereignty of the pope appears at all. This act of allegiance to the emperor was repeated when Barbarossa appeared, and indeed the archbishops of Ravenna soon became the most eager if not most the serious supporters of the emperors in all the great plain and perhaps in all Italy. Ravenna, once the imperial capital, though fallen was imperial still. She was haunted, haunted by ghosts that were restless in those marvellous tombs, that litter her churches, loom out of the grey curtain of mist like a fortress, or shine and glitter with imperishable colours and are full of memories as imperishable as themselves.

Yet though it was to her the emperors so often looked for aid and succour and rest, it was not always so. The present, even with her, was more than the past. With the great development of communal institutions which marked especially the twelfth century, compelled too to face, though never with success, the increasing state of Venice, which, indeed, and successfully, had usurped her place in the world and had realised what she had failed to achieve, she was ready and able in 1198 to place herself at the head of the league of the cities of the Romagna and the Marches against the imperial power then both oppressive and feeble; so that pope Innocent III. found it easy to restore the unforgotten rights of the Holy See there and these were ratified by Otto IV. and by Frederick II. as the price of papal support.

It will thus be readily understood that if, at the opening of the thirteenth century, there was one city in Italy more certain than another to be at the mercy of the universal quarrel of Guelf and Ghibelline, that city was Ravenna. In its larger sense that quarrel was her inheritance. It was the one thought which filled her mind. But here, as elsewhere, the great quarrel was insoluble or at any rate not to be solved. It merely bred faction and divided the city against itself. Guelf and Ghibelline tore Ravenna as they tore Florence and Siena in pieces.

The two great Ghibelline families were the Ubertini and the Mainardi and these at first gained the mastery of the city; but in 1218 Pietro Traversari with the aid of the Mainardi turned the Ubertini out and, what is more, made himself master.

Pietro Traversari was succeeded as Podesta in 1225 by his son Paolo, who became Guelf and fought in Innocent IV.'s quarrel against the emperor Frederick II.; Frederick was able to turn the Traversari out of Ravenna in 1240 and to hold the city for eight years, but in 1248 the pope retook it and the Traversari were restored though not I think to the chief power. They remained in power till in the last year of the reign of Gregory X., 1275, Guido da Polenta appears.

Rudolph of Hapsburg was now king—not emperor, for he was never crowned by the pope. He had been a partisan of the second Frederick's, but pope Nicholas III. did not find in the founder of the Hapsburg dynasty the stuff of the Hohenstaufen. In 1278 he forced Rudolph to secure to him by an "irrevocable decree" all that the papacy had ever claimed in the Exarchate and the Pentapolis. The empire renounced all its claims in the Romagna and the Marches; the confines of the states of the Church were defined anew, and the cities of which the pope was absolute lord were named one by one. Of course among these was Ravenna.

The Polentani appear first in the story of Ravenna in or about the year 1167, when we find them acting as vicars for the archbishops. We next hear of them as Podesta, their long rule really beginning, as I have said, in 1275, when Guido il Vecchio, a rather formidable soldier, appears as captain of the people and victor over Cervia, whose territory he added to the dominion of Ravenna. It was indeed this man who first in the Ravenna of the Middle Ages attempted to establish an independent or semi-independent state, by adding territory to territory and thus creating a lordship. For this end he allied himself with the Malatesta of Rimini—a master stroke, for the Polentani of Ravenna and the Malatesta of Rimini had long been bitter foes.

The alliance was cemented by a marriage which all the world knows as an immortal tragedy. Guido Vecchio had a beautiful daughter, Francesca. Malatesta had two sons, the elder Giovanni called, for he was a cripple, lo Sciancato, the younger, for he was very fair, known as Paolo il Bello. To secure their alliance Polenta married his daughter Francesca to Malatesta's elder son Giovanni; but she had already learned to love, or she soon came to love, his brother Paolo il Bella. Giovanni came upon them one night in Rimini and killed them both with one thrust of his sword. The tragedy, however, should only be told in the immortal words of Dante, who recounts the tale Francesca told him in the second circle of the Inferno. For seeing Francesca and her lover floating for ever in each other arms "light before the wind," as the wind swayed them towards Virgil and himself the Florentine addressed them:

"O wearied spirits come, and hold discourse
With us, if by none else restrained.' As doves
By fond desire invited, on wide wings
And firm, to their sweet nest returning home,
Cleave the air, wafted by their will along,
Thus issued, from that troop where Dido ranks,
They, through the ill air speeding, with such force
My cry prevailed, by strong affection urged.
'O gracious creature and benign! who go'st
Visiting, through this element obscure,
Us, who the world with bloody stain imbrued,
If, for a friend, the King of all, we own'd,
Our prayer to him should for thy peace arise,
Since thou hast pity on our evil plight
Of whatsoe'er to hear or to discourse
It pleases thee, that will we hear, of that
Freely with thee discourse, while e'er the wind
As now is mute The land that gave me birth
Is situate on the coast, where Po descends
To rest in ocean with his sequent streams
'Love that in gentle heart is quickly learnt
Entangled him by that fair form, from me
Ta'en in such cruel sort, as grieves me still,
Love that denial takes from none beloved
Caught me with pleasing him so passing well
That as thou seest, he yet deserts me not
'Love brought us to one death, Caina waits
The soul who spilt our life' Such were their words,
At hearing which downward I bent my looks
And held them there so long that the bard cried
'What art thou pondering?' I in answer thus
'Alas' by what sweet thoughts, what fond desire
Must they at length to that ill pass have reached'
Then turning, I to them my speech address'd,
And thus began 'Francesca! your sad fate
Even to tears my grief and pity moves
But tell me, in the time of your sweet sighs,
By what, and how Love granted, that ye knew
Your yet uncertain wishes?' She replied
'No greater grief then to remember days
Of joy when misery is at hand That kens
Thy learn'd instructor Yet so eagerly
If thou art bent to know the primal root
From whence our love gat being, I will do
As one who weeps and tells his tale One day
For our delight we read of Lancelot,
How him love thrall'd Alone we were and no
Suspicion near us Oft-times by that reading
Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue
Fled from our altered cheek But at one point
Alone we fell When of that smile we read,
That wished smile, so rapturously kissed
By one so deep in love, then he, who ne'er
From me shall separate, at once my lips
All trembling kissed The book and writer both
Were love's purveyors In its leaves that day
We read no more' While thus one spirit spake
The other wailed so sorely, that heart-struck
I, through compassion fainting, seem'd not far
From death and like a corse fell to the ground"

With the name of Dante we come to the real importance Ravenna has for us in the Middle Age. Dante, however, was not the guest of Guido Vecchio. That great lord ruled in Ravenna as perpetual captain till his death in 1310, when he was succeeded by his son Lamberto who had for some time been the leading spirit in the city. He altogether abolished the so-called democratic government, that is to say, the consulship which was filled in turn by two consuls, the one succeeding the other every fifteen days. Lamberto made himself lord and reigned till 1316, when he was succeeded by his nephew Guido Novello, the consul of Cesena, who thus brought Cesena into the lordship. It is with this man that a universal interest in Ravenna may be said for a moment to revive, for it was he who had the honour to be the host of Dante Alighieri.

Guido Novello was not a mere adventurer like Guido Vecchio, he was a man of considerable culture, with a love of learning and of the arts. It was, as we shall see, at his earnest solicitation that Dante came to visit him, and if we may believe Vasari it was at the poet's suggestion he invited Giotto to his court. "As it had come to the ears of Dante that Giotto was in Ferrara, he so contrived that the latter was induced to visit Ravenna, where the poet was then in exile, and where Giotto painted some frescoes which are moderately good … for the Signori da Polenta."

Dante as we may think spent the last four years of his life in Ravenna. Those four years we shall consider presently. Here it will be enough to note that he met his death at last in the service of his host and benefactor Guido Novello. The most disastrous action of his life was, it will be remembered, the embassy he made on behalf of his own city of Florence to pope Boniface VIII. That business cost him his home and the city he loved with so cruel a passion; it made him an exile. It was upon the longest journey of all that his last embassy sent him. He set out it seems as ambassador of Guido Novello for Venice, which so far as the sea and all its business are concerned had long replaced Ravenna as mistress of the Adriatic. The recent acquisition of the city and the salt flats of Cervia by Ravenna had become a grievance with the Venetians who desired that monopoly for themselves. It seems that in some local quarrel at Cervia certain Venetian sailors had been killed and Dante went on Guide's behalf to clear the matter up. He was to be as it happened as unsuccessful in his last embassy as he had been in his first. The old doge, according to the legend which I am bound to say is now generally regarded as a fable, received him coldly and, so the tale runs, invited him to dinner upon a fast day. "In front of the envoys of other princes who were of greater account than the Polentani of Ravenna, and were served before Dante, the larger fish were placed, while in front of Dante was placed the smallest. This difference of treatment nettled Dante who took up one of the little fish in his hand and held it to his ear as though expecting it to say something. The doge observing this asked him what his strange behaviour meant. To which Dante replied: 'As I knew that the father of this fish met his death in these waters I was asking him news of his father.'

"'Well,' said the doge, 'and what did he answer?' Dante replied: 'He told me that he and his companions were too little to remember much about him; but that I might learn what I wanted to know from the older fish, who would be able to give me the news I asked for.'

"Thereupon the doge at once ordered Dante to be served with a fine large fish."

[Illustration: Colour Plate S. GIOVANNI BATTISTA]

Thus Dante called attention to his great achievement, by which I suppose he hoped at once to vindicate his dignity as a great man, certainly greater than any one present, and by this means to lend importance to his mission. Whatever may have been the personal result of his sally, it did his mission no good at all. When the official interview took place Dante, if we may believe something of the apocryphal "Letter of Dante to Guido da Polenta," began to address the doge in Latin and was bidden to speak in Italian or to obtain an interpreter. His mission was a failure and Venice, who in the person of her doge did her best to show either her ignorance of the great poet who did her the honour of crossing her Piazza or of her philistine contempt of him, lives in the Divine Comedy only as an illustration of Hell.

"Thus we from bridge to bridge …
Pass'd on, and to the summit reaching, stood
To view another gap, within the round
Of Malebolge, other bootless pangs.
Marvellous darkness shadow'd o'er the place.
In the Venetian arsenal as boils
Through wintry months tenacious pitch, to smear
Their unbound vessels …
So not by force of fire but art divine
Boiled here a glutinous thick mass, that round
Limed all the shore."

On his way back to Ravenna by land, for the Venetians added to their shame by refusing him the sea passage, he caught a fever in the marshes and returned to Ravenna only to die: the mightiest of all those—emperors and kings—who lie in that "generale sepolcro di santissimi corpi."

That was in 1321; and with the death of Dante our interest in Ravenna again becomes cold. Guido Novello soon fell, driven out of Ravenna, never to return, by Ostasio who had assassinated Guide's brother the archbishop-elect Rinaldo. Ostasio ruled with the title of vicar which he received both from Lewis the Bavarian and from pope Benedict XII. This vicious and cruel despot was succeeded by his equally cruel son Bernardino. He ruled for fourteen years, 1345-1359, not, however, without mishap, for his brothers conspired against him and flung him into prison at Cervia. He contrived, however, to turn the tables upon them and to hold them in the same dungeon where he himself had been their prisoner. He was succeeded at last by Guido Lucio, a man of some integrity; but he too was the victim of his family, his own sons rising up against him in his old age and in 1389 flinging him into prison where he died.

He was followed in the lordship of Ravenna by his son Ostasio. This man died in 1431, that is to say, in the midst of all the confusion, here in Romagna and the Marches, of the fifteenth century, when the condottieri were one and all looking for thrones and such ambitions as those of the Visconti, of Francesco Sforza, of Sigismondo Malatesta, of Federigo of Urbino and of a host of parvenus were struggling for dominion and mastery. Thus it was that Ostasio's successor, Ostasio, in 1438 was compelled to make alliance with duke Filippo Maria of Milan. Venice, ever watchful, saw Visconti's game, remembered Cervia, and insisted upon Ostasio coming to Venice. While there he learned that Venice had annexed his dominion. Nor are we surprised to learn that he ended his days in a Franciscan convent, where he was mysteriously assassinated, probably by order of Venice. But with the entry of Venice into Ravenna the Middle Age, even in that far place, comes to an end. The Polentani were done with. A new and vigorous government ushered the old imperial city into the Renaissance.